Wandering Thoughts

By its nature, anarchist theory is a vagabond theory, light of step,
always on the move. The reason is simple. Reality is not a static
thing, but a play of phenomena in which every individual is actively
immersed. Entrenchment of positions makes no real sense, but traps the
anarchist in the bogs of ideology and militancy. For this reason,
anarchist theoretical endeavors go their farthest when they are taken
lightly and playfully, as explorations, experiments and adventures, not
tasks or duties. What appears here is done in that spirit. Some of it I
wrote years ago, and no longer necessarily agree with, but I think it
has a certain challenge, a certain bite to it.

Every text on this site is anti-copyright. Use any that you like or find useful freely.

Barbaric Thoughts

On a Revolutionary Critique of Civilization

I
am convinced that a revolutionary challenge to the current social
order must necessarily be a challenge to the last ten thousand years
of institutional development that have created it. In short,
revolutionary critique must aim at civilization itself. But what
precisely does this mean?

On
all sides of the so-called debate over civilization among anarchists,
misunderstanding seems to be the only constant. This is not
surprising. These concepts are difficult, especially in terms of
their practical application in social struggle. In order to gain some
clarity, I think that it is necessary to examine a few questions:
What is revolutionarycritique? What is
civilization? What does a revolutionary critique of civilization mean
in the realm of ideas? What would a revolutionary critique of
civilization mean on a practical level? Each of these questions opens
up thousands of other questions, especially as one tries to apply
them in a revolutionary practice. But this should only frighten those
who have placed their faith in an ideology and confined themselves
within a supposedly “revolutionary” identity. For the rest of us
such questioning should be a fine challenge, a place for putting
ourselves on the line as a stake to be played.

What
is revolutionary critique?

Revolutionary
critique is a critique that aims to challenge the present society at
its roots in order to create a rupture with what is and bring about
radical social transformation. What else could “revolutionary”
mean? But there are many implications here.

First
of all, revolutionary critique is practical. It seeks a method for
working itself out in the world, for practically
challenging the
present social order. In other words, it is part of a real struggle
against the world that exists.

For
this reason, it also begins from the
present. A practical,
revolutionary challenge to the present will make use of the past and
the future, but will not be defined by them. Rather they are tools to
use in the attack against the present social order. Revolutionary
critique is a practice that strives to grasp everything
immediately here and
now. It involves an ongoing, incisive examination of the state,
capitalist social relationships, class struggle and technological
development as we encounter them.

Since
revolutionary critique aims at a rupture
with the present order, it begins with an attack upon all the
institutions of this society. It investigates their fundamental
relationships to each other and what these relationships mean. Thus,
it is not so much interested in their excesses or the ways in which
they may contradict the values they proclaim, but in how at
their best, even when
they live up to their proclaimed values, they fail to meet the basic
needs and desires of human beings. This society is fundamentally
anti-life, anti-human and anti-individual, simply because its own
reproduction requires the subjection of living human individuals to
its needs. Revolutionary critique starts from this realization.

Revolutionary
critique also absolutely rejects moral
critique. This may be the most important aspect in terms of my
argument. Revolution, in practice, is amoral. Even if at times, in
our struggles, a few use the rhetoric of “justice” and “rights”,
our revolutionary battle has nothing to do with justice or rights or
any other value external to us. We want to overturn this reality not
because it is unjust or evil or even “unfree”, but because we
want our lives back!
Morality belongs to this social order. It has been used over and over
again to keep us in our place – always backed up by the force of
arms. Morality serves well for maintaining what is, because its final
word is always constraint. Since we want to destroy what is, we must
also destroy morality – especially that which exists within us –
so that we can attack this society without constraint.

At
the same time, revolutionary critique does not reject principles(1).
Rather it helps us to determine a principled manner for acting
concretely against the ruling order in our daily lives. The lack of a
revolutionary critique can lead us to face specific experiences of
domination, exploitation and oppression as isolated incidents, and to
seek an immediate solution by any means necessary. A revolutionary
critique can expose the interconnections between these experiences
and show how the “solutions” offered by the institutions only
serve to increase their power over our lives. When we make a decision
to take our lives back in revolt against the social order, we are
choosing a way of encountering the world. It does not make sense for
us to use any means other than those that embody this end of taking
back our lives. This is true on the personal level and on the level
of social revolution. Every time we compromise with power, that part
of our life is lost to us. There are so many aspects of our lives
where we are constrained to compromise against our will. In the areas
of struggle, where we have a choice, an anarchist revolutionary
critique will move us to refuse compromise and to maintain our
autonomy.

What
is civilization?

“Civilization”
is a confusing word. Early European explorers often strongly
associated what was “good” with civilization. Thus, when they
encountered honest and generous non-civilized people, they would
sometimes describe them as “more civilized” than Europeans.
Today, the idea of civilization is frequently associated with good
wine, beautiful human creations and refined tastes, but in reality
the characteristics shared by all civilizations are far less
pleasant: domination, genocide and environmental devastation to name
a few.

Another
point of confusion is that many people conceive of “civilization”
as a single entity developing through time. This conception has its
source in the myth of Progress through which modern western
civilization, which now dominates the world, is justified and
idealized. This myth assumes that humanity has developed along a
single, fairly straight path that leads to where we are. In fact,
civilizations have arisen in several different places without
connections and without following a single path. Western civilization
is traced back to the “Fertile Crescent”, which is referred to as
the “cradle of civilization”. But Chinese, Japanese, Incan,
Mayan and Aztec civilizations, to name a few, have no connection to
this “cradle”. The rise of western civilization itself has not
been a smooth path. Rather it is the crossing, converging and
separating(2)
of several paths, sometimes through trade, far more often through
conflict. Thus, there have been several civilizations throughout
history. A convergence of a number of historical factors allowed
European civilization to carry out a conquest that has now spread
across the globe. But the idea of a single civilization that has
developed along a single path is part of the ideology of Progress,
and a revolutionary critique of civilization must be careful to avoid
this trap, because it can easily lead to a perspective that is simply
a reversal of the concept of Progress, rather than a rejection of
this myth. Such a reversal can only lead to a call to return
to an imagined beginning which is itself a myth. A revolutionary
critique of civilization needs to reject the mystification inherent
in the idea of Progress, not create a counter-myth based on a moral
judgment of Progress.

Although
the idea of a single civilization is false, there are some basic
traits that all civilizations have shared. These can be considered as
defining qualities of civilization. They can provide basic
understandings that are useful in clarifying what a revolutionary
critique of civilization might mean.

Civilization
comes from the Latin word civis, which means city-dweller.
Thus, civilization is a way of life based upon city dwelling –
upon dwelling within areas of concentrated human population separated
from the areas where this population gets its sustenance. A
revolutionary critique of civilization would thus want to examine the
social relationships that create and are created by cities.

But
the existence of what appears to be a city is not enough, in itself,
to define civilization. So let’s consider what happened when the
first civilizations arose. It is generally agreed that the first
civilizations began to develop about eight to ten thousand years ago.
But what actually began to develop? The evidence we have indicates
that certain specializations began to crystallize into a number of
intertwined social institutions: the state, property, the family,
religion, law, work (as an activity separated from life), etc. This
process took place through the alienation of people’s capacity to
create their own lives individually and collectively on their own
terms. This alienated creativity crystallized as concentrated power
and wealth centered in the institutions of society. Based on
dispossession of the great majority, the institutions are the
representation of class relationships. With the rise of this
institutional framework, society ceases to be a network of
relationships between individuals for meeting their needs and
desires, and instead becomes a network of predetermined,
institutionalized relationships that stands above people and into
which they must fit. Thus, they no longer consciously develop
techniques together for meeting their needs and desires. Instead
technological systems are developed with the aim of
reproducing the institutional social order, which is itself a
bureaucratic technology for mediating social relationships. The needs
and desires of individuals are subordinated to this framework, and
individuals themselves become cogs in the social machine. Their
survival is made dependent upon this social machine locking them into
an ongoing servitude that can only be broken through a radical
rupture with the social order, a destructive overturning of existing
social relationships, that opens the possibility for creating a new
life together.

When
I speak of civilization, I mean this network of institutions that
dominates our lives.

What
is a revolutionary critique of civilization in the realm of ideas?

If
civilization is the network of institutions that defines and
dominates our lives, then on a theoretical level, a revolutionary
critique of civilization is an examination of the nature of these
institutions. It examines the state, the economy and the
technological systems they develop to control our lives. It examines
the increasing precariousness of our existence on all levels. It is a
class analysis aimed at the destruction of this society, and so its
basis is first and foremost our lives here and now in this world.

Unfortunately,
much of what passes for critique of civilization nowadays fails to be
revolutionary, because it chooses a basis other than our own
confrontation with the social reality that is stealing our lives and
our own desire to take back our lives. These other bases may seem to
provide a model for a future non-civilized society or for current
activity; or they may seem to provide a solid moral basis upon which
to stand. But in either case, such bases cannot serve a revolutionary
critique. Let’s look at some of these ideas.

From
a revolutionary point of view, biocentrism is utterly useless. It is
a moral perspective at its very root. It starts from Life as an
abstraction that stands above us, which we are to serve. Although it
is sometimes presented with a scientific basis (in ecological
biology), it is essentially a metaphysical/moral perspective.
Biocentrism is always opposed to anthropocentrism, supposedly
“human-centered” thinking. Anthropocentrism is really just
another name for humanism. Humanism is the ideology that starts from
an abstract conception of the Human and places this above us as the
ideal we are to strive to attain. Its practice in the social realm is
based on the concept of rights that society is to protect. In
reality, biocentrism does not challenge humanism at its roots. It
simply seeks to expand the moral values of humanism to include all of
Life and not just the Human. Life, not merely the Human, is the ideal
we are to uphold. In the social realm, biocentrism merely seeks the
expansion of rights and protections to the non-human without
challenging the roots of the social order. This is why so many deep
ecologists spend so much time working on litigation and legislation
to protect this or that species or acreage of wilderness. This
practice exposes the non-revolutionary nature of their perspective.
In fact, since it rests in a representational practice (deep
ecologist activists represent the Earth and Life in the courts and
legislatures), it is at root a political and reformist viewpoint. A
revolutionary critique of civilization will refuse this ideology
completely.

An
environmental perspective can be useful in exposing the harmfulness
of the institutions that control our lives. The technological
development necessary for maintaining social control and the
expansion of capital causes extensive damage. One important aspect of
our current precarious existence is the increasing damage being done
to our bodies and our living environments, raising the question of
how much more we can take. But the harmfulness of this society does
not just exist in the various physical toxins we are forced to
ingest. If that were the limit of the problem, it might indeed simply
be a question for the “experts” or one that could be legislated
away. The fundamental harmfulness of this society lies in the social
relationships it imposes. These social relationships make us
dependent upon a massive technological system over which we have no
control. And the physical harm of this system – the poisoning of
rivers, the irradiating of food, the spread of toxic chemicals and
engineered genetic material everywhere – is integral to its
existence. Thus, an environmental critique can only become
revolutionary by being part of a total critique of the social
relationships that make us dependent on this toxic mega-machine. It
can provide one tool in the development of that critique, but is not
adequate in itself.

I
have never called myself a primitivist, because I do not base my
critique of civilization on real or presumed traits of so-called
“primitive” societies. The ideology of a past Golden Age is at
best pure speculation. We know very little about prehistoric human
beings and how they lived, and the latest literature in the field has
moved away from some of the more idyllic pictures popular among
pre-historians a couple decades ago. We can read more about modern
so-called “primitive” people in the writings of anthropologists,
ethnologists and various other literate people who have traveled
among them. And certainly this can provide some useful tools for
examining civilization and human possibilities. But it is necessary
to recognize that this knowledge is always speculative, partial and
biased, and does not provide a basis for a revolutionary critique of
civilization. Primitivism as an ideology idealizes the so-called
“primitive”. Some contemporary primitivists attempt to sidestep
this limitation by referring to an alleged “primal nature”
inherent to all human beings rather than to previously or presently
existing primitive people. Although they may avoid the accusation of
a hypocritical use of science for their own convenience in this way,
they do not escape the problem of basing their perspective on an
external ideal. In fact, these primitivists have simply revived the
humanist ideology with a twist: “primal” human nature becomes the
“real” self we must discover and strive to attain. Being a form
of humanism, this perspective is moral in its essence. It attempts to
provide a basis for revolution without class struggle by replacing
this with “primal war”, but since the latter has its basis in our
alleged “primal nature”, and not in our actual confrontation with
the circumstances the present world has imposed on us, it is simply a
moral ideal of how revolution “should” come about. For Montaigne
and Rousseau such idealizations remained a poetic means for lamenting
the evils of civilization, but for some modern primitivists it
becomes a moral ideal, a model for a post-civilization way of life
and sometimes even a concept of what an anti-civilization practice
should be here and now. As such, it is not useful to a revolutionary
critique of civilization. It remains a mere moral critique based upon
abstract concepts of good (primitive) and evil (civilized). Social
relationships vanish in this idealization, and it is easy to get
sidetracked into ideas and practices completely out of touch with the
realities we face.

This
may be why a few primitivists have gone so far as to reject the very
concept of revolution, preferring to “prepare” for a coming
collapse of civilization by studying “primitive skills” at
high-priced schools started for that purpose. It seems that they
imagine this collapse in a way similar to the visions of the Ghost
Dance movement among Native Americans of the late 19th
century, where civilized reality is simply pealed away to immediately
reveal a pristine undamaged Wild Nature. Like the survivalists of a
decade ago, these primitivists have given up on the possibility of
people taking history into their own hands in order to destroy the
order of domination and radically transform social relationships. So
instead they dream of the apocalypse, after which a few will be able
to live again in the Eden of their imagined “primitive” world.

In
fact, if such a collapse occurred, it would almost certainly involve
a drawn-out process involving massive war on the part of the various
rulers of this world to maintain their power by whatever means
necessary and an unmediated confrontation with the devastation the
natural environment has undergone. I have no desire to “prepare
for” such a collapse, seeing it rather as one of the dismal
possibilities this society offers. I would much rather put the effort
into consciously dismantling the social order through revolutionary
endeavors. A conscious revolutionary dismantling of civilization
would involve a conscious confrontation with the realities civilized
reality has created and an exploration of ways to restore truly
livable environments.

Of
course, the primitivists who openly reject revolution are very few.
Nonetheless, I think that they are the one’s who most consistently
follow out the logic of primitivism. Idealizing what was would
consistently lead to either passive admiration (as in Montaigne and
Rousseau) or imitation, but not a radical and destructive
confrontation with what is.

However,
there is one very significant lesson we can learn from examining what
is known about non-civilized people. Civilization has shown itself to
be a homogenizing process. This becomes especially clear now that a
single civilization has come to dominate the globe. It could even
lead one to believe in a set human nature. But looking at what we
know about non-civilized people, it becomes clear that there are vast
varieties of ways that humans can live in this world, endless
possibilities for relating with oneself, each other and the
surrounding environment. Deterministic speculations have no place
here. Instead, the very real possibilities for revolutionary
transformation can be seen as it becomes clear that the social world
we live in has not always been. But our possibilities will open up in
the course of our project here and now, so the “primitive” cannot
be used as a model, simply as one tool among many for achieving a
clearer understanding of the nature of civilization.

One
of the areas of theoretical exploration that developed among
anti-civilization anarchists is the exploration of origins. This
exploration certainly opened up many interesting questions. It has
also opened the possibility for a drift into ideology. The first
thing we need to keep in mind while exploring origins is that we
cannot find answers. This can only be an area for speculation and
raising questions. Otherwise, it turns into a search for the
“original sin” after which the fall into civilization was
inevitable, and we are on the path of a determinism that requires
redemption not revolution.

The
exploration of origins was mainly opened by John Zerzan in the
1980’s. It was an attempt to look into the possible sources of
alienation that made the rise of civilization possible. From the
start one of the weaknesses of Zerzan’s explorations was the lack
of a clear explanation of what he meant by alienation. This lack of
clarity infected those anarcho-primitivists who took Zerzan’s
writings as a major theoretical source. I understand alienation as
the separation of our existence from ourselves through a system of
social relationships that steals our capacity to create our lives on
our own terms in order to use our energy to produce and reproduce
what is necessary to maintain separated, centralized wealth and
power. What is alien to me is thus that which I cannot enjoy as my
own. Alienation, in this sense, cannot be caused by an idea or way of
thinking. Its source must lie in social relationships. At times,
Zerzan seems to use alienation in this way, but usually he is far
more abstract, speaking of human alienation from nature in a
quasi-mystical sense. And this latter conception seems prevalent in
much of the anarcho-primitivist milieu. It is as if they see nature
as a metaphysical entity with which humans once had an intimate
relationship of unity and from which they have become separated. This
is a precise parallel to christian theology, but god has been
replaced with a unified nature. The idea of a “fall” into
civilization (a term Zerzan frequently uses) follows logically from
this. It also explains the frequent claims that we cannot experience
unalienated moments in this world – after all, it is a fallen
world. Rather than offering any adequate ideas of how fallen people
in a fallen world could make a revolution to undo the fall, Zerzan,
John Connor and some other primitivists take a strange pleasure in
showing the social disintegration of the modern world as though this,
in itself, was the path to the destruction of civilization. The low
point of all this was Steve Booth’s article “The Irrationalists”.
Booth, being unable to go further along this path, completely gave up
any critique of civilization, choosing instead to become a supporter
of the British Green Party. Zerzan himself resorts to evangelism –
talking with journalists from The New York Times, Spin,
and various other mainstream publications, appearing on Art Bell’s
radio show and on 60 Minutes, going to “sustainability”
and environmental law conferences to present his message. That Zerzan
has utterly compromised any revolutionary critique with this
“practice” is irrelevant since we all have to compromise in this
world. Only in the paradise that will arise when civilization falls
can we escape compromise. Thus, Zerzan’s revolution can only be
understood as redemption from a fallen world. But who or what
is the redeemer?

In
fact, I think that it may be Zerzan’s theological way of dealing
with the matter of alienation that limits his own capacity to develop
his explorations of origins in useful manner. Though Zerzan opened up
important theoretical areas in calling language, time, symbolic
thought, etc. into question, he failed to take advantage of this.
Rather than exploring the nature of language, time or symbolic
thought as social relationships and bringing this into the present,
he came to accept his first declarations as final answers and began
to repeat the same chorus that “this all has to go” and to judge
others in terms of their adherence to what has become his line. And
once he found a saint (and potential redeemer) in the Unabomber(3),
his ideology became so entrenched that he could no longer develop his
ideas; he could only preach them.

Of
course, attempting to explore origins does take one into treacherous
waters. One has to be able to distinguish a necessary contingency
from a cause. It is true, for example, that the rise of civilization
is contingent upon the existence of language. But this does not mean
that language inevitably leads to civilization. The existence of
frontal lobes in the brain is also necessary to the rise of
civilization, but does not cause it. It is the capacity to
distinguish necessary contingencies from causes that allows one to
escape the sort of determinism described above.

It
is also easy, in the search for original causes, to reify social
relationships. Zerzan has certainly done this with time, language and
symbolic thought. Declaring them to be the source of our problem
involves forgetting that they originate in social relationships, in
real or perceived needs and desires developing between people. But we
cannot know what these were; we can only speculate, and for some that
is not satisfying. What we can do is examine the social relationships
surrounding language, time and symbolic thought now. Such an
examination is particularly interesting as it indicates that capital
and its technological system are, in a certain sense, in the process
of destroying language and time. The destruction of languages
worldwide, the degradation of individual languages and the withering
of imagination and with it the capacity to speak and live poetically
are significant aspects of the reality we face. All of this can be
traced to the needs of the ruling order, its technological
development and the domination of the mass media and the internet
over communication. This requires an analysis far more complex than
declarations that language causes alienation. It is quite obvious now
that the loss of language does not make us less alienated or
less civilized, simply less capable of communicating with each other
and of expressing any desires outside of the channels permitted by
the ruling order.

In
the same way, the world of capital, its technology and mass media is
stealing away our time. In its stead we are given an eternal
present, but not the edenic one Zerzan imagines. Rather it is the
eternal present of routines repeated day after day that have no
direct relationship to our own needs and desires, but that are
required of us to earn the money we need to continue surviving at the
level we’re used to. This is coupled to the media portrayal of
events around the world as unconnected moments without past or
future. The present social order steals away the past as a living
reality we can use in any meaningful way and the future as a place of
possibilities and dreams, leaving us only with an impoverished
present of day-to-day enslavement. Here too a deeper analysis of the
current social relationships are necessary, one that allows us to
take back our history and our dreams as tools to use against this
society here and now.

Of
course, primitivism itself refers to a past, but it is a mystified
past that stands as an ideal above us, not a concrete past of
revolutionary struggle against the ruling order. Some primitivists
dismiss the latter because those in struggle did not have a conscious
critique of civilization. But dismissal makes a critical encounter
with these past struggles impossible. And a critical encounter with
the revolutionary past is too useful a tool to give up in the battle
against this civilized world. Each of these struggles can be seen as
part of an unfinished social war in which knowledge of the aim and
the enemy become gradually clearer, but only if we encounter and
wrestle critically with this past, rather than seeking a mythical
past to use as an ideal. It is particularly important at this time
when civilization itself is creating historical amnesia that we
refuse to succumb to it, and that we continue to grasp revolutionary
history as a weapon against the ruling order.

In
short, for a revolutionary critique of civilization, the exploration
of origins only has use as the opening up of areas for continual
questioning. The fundamental concepts it calls into question need to
be examined in terms of present-day social relationships, so that we
can know where the points of conflict with the ruling order exist and
understand what is at stake.

Another
conception that has been used in developing a critique of
civilization is that of “wildness”. I am among those who have
made use of this concept in exploring the meaning of civilization and
what a revolution against it might be like. But there is a danger for
the concept of wildness to be tamed – that is, to be crystallized
into a concrete idea of what we should be and do. When I have
used the concept of wildness in my critical examinations of the
nature of civilization and the revolt against it, it is precisely
because, unlike the “primitive”, human wildness is an unknown.
It does not provide answers or models, but raises questions. Its
crystallization into a model takes the form of equating it with the
way of life of human foragers and/or anthropomorphizing traits of
non-human animals (like instincts). The idea of an inherent “primal”
human nature falls precisely into this trap, defining an ideal, not
raising questions of how we can take back our lives as our own.
Defining wildness as a model turns it into a moral value that stands
above us and our daily struggles. In this form it is not useful as a
revolutionary tool. Only as a tension against the civilized reality
that is imposed on us, that is to say only as a perpetual theoretical
and practical questioning, can wildness have use in the development
of a revolutionary critique of civilization.

A
revolutionary critique of civilization is a critique of the social
relationships of civilization. The rise of civilization is in
fact the rise of the centralization and institutionalization of power
and wealth. Starting with the dispossession of a large number of
people – with the stealing away of their capacity to create their
lives on their terms –, relationships of domination and
exploitation, that is to say class relationships, are imposed.
With the institution of class relationships, class struggle begins.
At bottom, this is the struggle of the dispossessed to take back
their lives and the struggle of the ruling order to maintain its
dominance.

If
we begin our critique of civilization from this basis, we can see
that the struggle against civilization is at root a class struggle
and an egoist struggle. Its basis lies not in renunciation, but in
the project of reappropriation – of stealing back what has
been taken from us. The mega-machine of the industrial, capitalist
state is a juggernaut for which each of us as individuals is nothing
but fodder. The social relationships of its institutional framework
are built into its technological system, making any vision of
self-management of this vast apparatus absurd. So the point is to
destroy it, not for “the Earth” or “Life” or “Wild Nature”,
but rather for ourselves, in order to freely experiment with the
innumerable possibilities for relating and creating our lives without
domination of any sort, for exploring the collective project of
individual self-realization. So a revolutionary critique of
civilization will have its basis in a communist and egoist critique
of the existent – in other words, it will be fundamentally
anarchist.

And
how might it work out in practice?

A
revolutionary critique of civilization stems from the desire for a
world in which we, human beings, can live on our own terms,
creating our lives together as a conscious ongoing project. It has no
place for the misanthropy that is central to much biocentric ideology
and sometimes infects environmental perspectives. Nor does it
recognize either primitivist practice or “rewilding” as panaceas
for the harmfulness of civilization. Though primitive skills may be
useful and methods for healing and expanding wild places are
necessary, they do not constitute the practical expression of
a revolutionary critique of civilization.

The
fact is that we cannot go back. North America still has fairly
large regions of wilderness, some of which seems to be humanly
livable for very small numbers. But it could not possibly support the
hundreds of millions of people of this continent. In much of the rest
of the world, wilderness has disappeared or been devastated. In
Europe and most of Asia, for example, a foraging life is not an
option for anyone. The road back is closed, and since the road
forward is clearly leading us to increasing domination and disaster,
it is clear we must leave the road and go elsewhere.

So
a revolutionary critique of civilization requires us to leave
all known paths. There are no easy answers or models to follow. From
an anarchist perspective this shouldn’t be seen as a negative
thing, since it leaves no place for leaders or ideological dogmas. In
fact, it brings us back to the present, to our lives and struggles,
to the world we face.

So
let’s take a look at this world. A single civilization – that of
the state and capital – dominates it. Despite totalitarian
tendencies, this domination is not absolute. Other ways of being and
relating exist at its margins and beneath its vision. Its spread
across the globe has forced it to develop methods of social
reproduction and control that are decentralized into a technological
and bureaucratic network. Because control and the relationships of
domination and exploitation are built into this network, it cannot be
said that anyone, even the ruling class, actually controls it. It
acts to control us not only through monitoring our activities, but
more importantly by making us dependent upon it and by determining
within very narrow parameters how we can interact with it. In short,
it transforms us into cogs within its technological framework. This
is why talk of seizing the current means of production for any
purpose other than destroying them makes no sense. It is a means of
domination and control, not of creating what we need and desire. The
nodes of this network include computers, surveillance cameras, credit
cards, ID cards and so on. This network seems to be everywhere, but
it is stretched thin, leaving plenty of cracks and making it very
fragile. One of the outcomes of this fragility has been that more and
more people are falling through the cracks, finding themselves with
no place within this society. Forced into poverty, immigration,
homelessness and illegality, these undesirables have little, if
anything, to lose in acting against this society. They are a class of
barbarians within the gates of this vast civilized death machine.
Even those who do not fall through the cracks find their existence
increasingly precarious on all levels. If they were to see what they
have in common with those who have fallen through the cracks, this
could prove disastrous for the ruling order. And, of course, there
are those who choose to live within the cracks for the relative
invisibility it grants them, allowing them greater freedom to
determine significant aspects of their lives. These people too have
every reason to fight against the megamachine. The masters of this
world are aware of all this and, in recent years, have been
practicing fierce preventative repression in an open manner.

Uprisings
and revolutions are not the product of radical ideas,
though such ideas can certainly play a significant role in the way an
uprising develops – at least, if they are created and expressed in
a relevant and revolutionary manner. But it is our rage over the
conditions of existence imposed on us combined with a complete lack
of faith in the capacity and willingness of either the ruling or
oppositional institutions to do anything to change them to our
advantage that can make self-organized revolt flare up as wildcat
strikes, blockades of roads and docks, occupations of spaces,
sabotage, vandalism, riots and insurrections. In these incidents and
activities, we can see the desire to take our lives back directly
confronting this civilization, which steals our lives away, as it
exists here and now. These struggles are direct (if usually
unconscious) attacks against the theft of our lives. This is why they
express both class struggle and the struggle against civilization as
we know it.

But
then what of the consciously developed revolutionary critique of
civilization? How does it express itself in practice? Each of us
encounters bits of the network of control in our lives every day.
Opportunities for attack are not lacking. So the problem is how to
find accomplices, how to discover the small threads of revolt here
and there and figure out how to weave them together. During the
transit worker wildcat strikes in Italy last December and January
(2003-2004), there were comrades pointing out that this was an
opportunity to skip the imposed activities of this society and use
the time instead to explore the possibilities of face-to-face
communication and shared activity. And others sabotaged transit
ticket machines. An intertwining of struggles was at least beginning
to express itself. Recently in the United States, so-called
“independent” truckers working at the docks in Oakland and L.A.
had wildcat strikes. Revolutionaries in both cities went to talk with
truckers. Some of the truckers expressed strong anti-war sentiments.
Points of connection certainly existed.

And,
of course, there is no need to wait for others to start a struggle.
Our lives have been stolen from us; we have been dispossessed of our
capacity to determine the conditions of our existence, and the enemy
and its tools are everywhere around us. So we can initiate our own
struggles. Consider the surveillance cameras over our heads. Consider
the institutional and economic supports for the war in Iraq – and
for wars elsewhere – that surround us. Consider the research in
nanotechnology, with the horrifying possibilities it opens up for the
penetration of social control directly into our bodies, that is
happening right under our noses… The targets are not hard to find.

I
have said that a revolutionary critique of civilization is based in
class struggle. But I do not simply mean the struggle of one class
against the other. More essentially, I mean the struggle of the
exploited, the dispossessed, the proletarianized against their
condition as such. It is obviously in the interest of the ruling
class to maintain class society, and thus the entire technological
and bureaucratic apparatus through which it operates. But it is not
in our interest to maintain our class position. As long as we remain
exploited, dispossessed, proletarian, we still do not have our lives.
The reappropriation of our lives brings our existence as a class to
an end; this struggle is the collective movement for individual
liberation. So in class struggle the critique of civilization looks
for the methods and forms that carry the destruction of class within
them.

Understanding
class struggle in this sense gives us a few clues as to its practical
expressions. The specific incidents that provoke struggle will vary
widely and may have lesser immediate aims. But those of us whose
activity is informed by a revolutionary critique of civilization, and
thus by a desire to destroy class relations as such, will only use
methods which clearly express the struggle to take back our lives.
Thus, we will refuse representation by any oppositional organization
such as unions or parties, maintaining the autonomy of our struggle.
We will refuse to petition, to negotiate or to compromise with the
rulers of this world. We will choose the methods, times and places of
our actions for ourselves. And we will attack the institutions and
machinery of power that stand in our way. Our accomplices will be
those who choose to share such methods, and our struggles will
intertwine with others for as long as they choose to follow this
path, and will separate as our methods and aims become incompatible.

In
addition, since the struggle is to take back our lives and our
capacity to create them collectively on our own terms, it will
express itself as a luddite practice. At the very beginning of the
industrial era, the luddites recognized that the factory system was a
technological method for imposing specific social relationships of
exploitation and control, and they attacked it. In the two hundred
years since then, the methodology of the factory – the development
of intertwining, mutually dependent technological systems into which
social control and relationships specific to the needs of capital and
the state are built – has extended over the entire social landscape
and our stolen lives are trapped as dead labor within this apparatus,
reproducing its domination over us. Taking our lives back requires
the destruction of the machine, so the play of Ned Ludd is central to
the practical expression of a revolutionary critique of civilization.

The
project of taking back our lives is fundamentally egoist. The fact
that this project needs to become collective if it is to succeed does
not change this. The intertwining of struggles and revolts based on
affinity, complicity and revolutionary solidarity is a fine
description of what a union of egoists might be. And egoism gives us
another hint about how a revolutionary critique of civilization might
act in the world (particularly in contrast to a moral critique).
Rejecting all moralistic and deterministic ideology, the egoist does
not look for sources of the original sin of civilization to renounce
and avoid. Instead she raises the question, “What can I take up as
my own to use as a weapon for destroying this society? What can I use
as a tool for creating the life I choose with others against this
society?” Social institutions and the industrial system carry the
relationships of domination and exploitation within themselves. They
are useless to the project of taking back our lives.

But
it is in the course of struggle against this civilized order that we
will discover what tools and techniques we can take as our own to use
for making our lives. Any anti-civilization critique that tries to
define these possibilities beforehand is a moral critique and
of little use in revolutionary transformation. Nonetheless, we can
draw conclusions about a couple traits these tools would have. First
of all, the users of the tools would need to be able to clearly
understand on an immediate level the consequences of their use. Any
tool of such complexity that its consequences remain invisible to the
user, having no direct relationship to his reason for using the tool,
would constitute a technological system. The theft of life is
embodied in such a system, because those who use it have no control
over the outcome of their use. Rather they become the victims of
consequences beyond their capacity to foresee. We see the results of
this in environmental devastation and the various epidemics and other
threats to health all around us, as well as in the spread of
technologies of social control into every corner of the earth.
Secondly, every technique used would have to be reversible. If a
technique proves to be harmful or dominating, we need to be able to
lay it down immediately and go on about our activities using other
means. This rules out any large-scale technical systems, since they
themselves consist of intertwined, inter-dependent techniques that
reinforce each other and in turn transform us into dependent parts of
the machinery as well.

I
hope that without presenting a model, I have given some idea of what
a revolutionary critique of civilization might look like as it acts
in the world. Of course, there can be no model for the violent
destruction of the world of domination and the seizing back of our
lives that constitute social revolution. There can only be
indications. It is up to us to figure out the meaning of those
indications in our own lives where we are.

A
few final words

I
have written this due to my disappointment at the direction much of
the discussion of the critique of civilization has taken. Basing
itself in ideals placed above us, it becomes permeated with dogma and
moralizing, with consequent misunderstanding on all sides. More
significantly, these ideals are of little use to those who are trying
to develop a revolutionary critique of civilization with practical
relevance in the daily struggles of the exploited against their
condition. To be revolutionary, a critique of civilization needs to
have such relevance. This means that it will offer no final answers
and may indeed appear to stutter like the barbarian who doesn’t
know the language of the city, that is, of politics. But in practice
this refusal of final answers goes hand-in-hand with the swinging of
the iconoclast’s hammer, smashing every idol and dogma, even those
in the temples of anarchy and anti-civilization. It is my hope that
these written explorations prove useful in our ongoing development of
such a critique.

_______________________________

(1)
In fact, Nechaeyev’s replacement of revolutionary critique with a
moral idealization of “revolution” led him to reject principles.
In the name of this highest ideal, anything could be justified. A
similar logic created the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Reign of
Terror.

(2)
I am thinking here specifically of the definitive separation between
European and Middle Eastern civilizations that occurred with the
breakdown of the Roman Empire though I am certain other examples can
be found.

(3)
Now that Ted Kaszinsky has explicitly rejected the idealization of
primitive people that John Zerzan and his acolytes promote, suddenly
he has become a misogynist and a homophobe rather than a saint.